Anna: After a postponement both in real life and on the PT topics list, it is finally time to discuss Poland. The polls are too close to call, though I have NO IDEA how well Poland does at accurate polling, despite my last name.
(…which I’m just now realizing none of you know but trust me, so Polish)
Current right wing President Andrzej Duda faces off against Warsaw Mayor Rafal Trzaskowski, who only picked up ~30% of the votes in Round One but is expected to pick up voters whose candidates…aren’t either of those two. The Michael Keaton knockoff faces the Ethan Hawke lookalike this Sunday. Duda, recently found at the White House, obviously the safest least-COVID-y place in the world right now, may not have picked up the ‘Rona during his last visit but did leave with some new populist tricks up his sleeve, including proposing a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex couples from adoption. Because you know, children and LGBTQIA+ people are having really easy breezy years. Just floating right through 2020. The BBC says the Polish state media accused Trzaskowski of “being in cahoots with Jewish and LGBT interest groups,” so….go off Monty.
Monty: Tomorrow is the second round of the Presidential election. Like a lot of countries (stares in Israel) Poland had a much more left-leaning political culture when I was a child but has moved steadily right, so with all said and done, the vote will be between Duda, the conservative, and Trzaskowki, who is a moderate supported by almost everyone else.
As for the Jewish thing, yeah, there’s a big wave of antisemitic revisionism going on in Poland. Duda’s government is obsessed with rejecting claims that nobody is making that Poland did the Holocaust, and has taken this to the point of making it illegal to claim that anyone in Poland was complicit in Nazi atrocities. This has led to a longstanding diplomatic standoff between Poland and Israel, despite Netanyahu’s historic support for right-wing populists with antisemitic links in Europe. So that should tell you how bad it is.
Anna: Also, Trzaskowski worked for a guy called Donald Tusk and I thought the year had officially broken my brain.
